Œil Pour Œil

This project explores the belief in the “evil eye”, widespread within the Maghrebi diaspora. It is a religious and superstitious belief according to which a look or a compliment has the power to cast a curse on the person who receives it. The “evil eye” is a fascinating belief that has crossed ages and borders and has resisted both modernity and the grip and decline of established religions. This endurance can be explained by the fact that the belief in the “evil eye” is flexible and offers a fertile symbolic framework in which local and even individual meanings can be inserted. What particularly fascinates me about this belief is the way I myself have found meaning in it while living in a so-called “postmodern” society and having a rather rational relationship to existence. The belief in the “evil eye” continues to feed and stimulate my imagination. It was passed on to me through elements of language, folk stories and protective rites. What the “evil eye” tells us helps us understand a little better how beliefs are transformed in a new cultural context and how diasporic identity is built.

The ŒIL POUR ŒIL project was born from a story: that of my aunt Aïcha, who was the first to speak to me about the “evil eye”. She taught me everything: how to protect oneself from it, how to diagnose it and how to cure it. She backed up this teaching with terrible stories of the “evil eye”. Most of these dramas had happened to her, and she knew how to laugh about them as well as cry. Aïcha has always been a gifted storyteller. She fed my childhood imagination, then my imagination as an artist, and her dramas have surprisingly become an insatiable source of inspiration.

The paintings related to this project belong to a surrealist artistic current. They explore certain concepts associated with the belief in the “evil eye”, such as desire, envy, the gaze, contentment, protection and healing. They use a colour emblematic of the belief in the “evil eye”: blue. The act of painting in blue is not trivial. It is in itself a ritual of protection against the evil eye and turns the paintings into symbolic protective amulets.

In this project, augmented reality informs us about the spiritual dimension linked to the “evil eye”. It is a medium of the sacred in that it can make a mystical sensory environment visible and create an experience in which the boundary between the spiritual world and the physical world becomes blurred.

This project was shown in person at Fais-moi L’art in Montreal (2024), at the Centre culturel Georges-Vanier in Montreal (2025) and at the Centre d’exposition Léo-Ayotte in Shawinigan (2026).